The missed opportunity of 2005 – Enhancing the candidate experience through email marketing

On our EXCELER8ion blog, I continually make the case that successful online recruitment marketing will directly mirror the successful emarketing efforts of the general retail sector. Today an article was posted on MediaPost’s EmailInsider – Obit: Batch And Blast Is Dead! This is a great little piece mainly focused on why so called “Batch and blast” mass email marketing is so 1999. The author, Stephanie Miller – vice president of strategic services for Return Path, a New York-based e-mail performance-management company – makes the case that mass email no longer works to drive revenue growth. Subscriber inboxes are overflowing with permission-based e-mail that is irrelevant.

The article urges retailers to do away with generic e-mail that isn’t targeted or customized to the subscriber, and relies very heavily on other marketing and branding efforts to engage with subscribers. It’s little more than a reminder service. And, more importantly, it’s a huge missed opportunity to connect, build relationships, capture market share and strengthen brands. The alternative is utilizing DATA to provide custom, relevant e-mail experiences for each important subscriber segment.

This is a direct parallel for how to drive a higher and more qualified response when utilizing email for Recruitment Marketing. Just like retailers have data that provide them intelligent and actionable methods for measuring a subscriber’s place in the sales and product lifecycle – ATS systems provide HR with data about where a candidate is in the recruitment process. With this data, email can be a powerful way to create relevant candidate experiences – the key to driving higher response.

In my view, email has received a bad rep in the recruitment world; I feel that this is huge missed opportunity. I agree with Jeff Hunter, author of the award winning Talentism blog, that doomsayers of technology often make the mistake of applying the filter of past technological failures to future technological opportunities. Suggesting that a company uses email for recruitment marketing often gets me raised eyebrows and the “it doesn’t work” response. We need to push past the “failures” of this medium and the perception that it doesn’t work. Utilize the data that you already collect and create custom, relevant e-mail experiences to connect and build relationships with candidates and strengthen employer brands.

4 Responses to "The missed opportunity of 2005 – Enhancing the candidate experience through email marketing"

I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps the most significant reason that early email marketing campaigns often failed was that advertisers did not properly target the intended recipients. For about five years, we’ve been using targeted email campaigns to help the employers hire candidates from CollegeRecruiter.com, our job board. That part of our business has been growing astronomically and is now much bigger than job postings and resume searching.

Employers which are looking to hire one or two people are usually not well served by targeted email campaigns because the costs are too high. But those which are looking to hire dozens, hundreds, or even thousands are unlikely to find a better medium. Within a few days, they can reach tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of targeted candidates. Targeted email vendors that work closely with the consumer ISPs have a high deliverability rate so ISP-level spam filters aren’t an issue.

The bottom line for employers is their cost per hire and that’s very low for properly targeted email campaigns. We typically see about 15 percent of the emails being opened (read), which is about three times the industry average, and about 15 percent of those turn into click throughs. Employers typically see about 20 percent of the clicks turning into applications (leads) and they hire about five to 10 percent of those. When you work through the math, the cost per hire tends to be $100 to $200, which is VERY inexpensive when compared to the cost of newspaper advertising. In addition, the time to hire is excellent, as virtually all of the responses occur within just a few days.

So are targeted email campaigns dead? Far from it. They’re thriving and should be.